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Republican Wars: Chapter IV - A New Beginning
 Sarah Palin spoke Wednesday night and the air cleared on the Republican side of the poltical house.The Republican party, like the Dems, has always been a coalition. Today it's made up of a mix of economic conservatives, social conservatives, free trade advocates, paleocons, neocons, William F. Buckley cons, ex-cons, libertarians, Second Amendment advocates, evangelicals, and guys who just came in to get out of the political rain. Because of the often competing opinions, it's been an interesting political party, a lot more fun than the dour Dems with their didacticism and their attitude of being ever so much more sensitive and politically correct than thou. But the Pubs have also been in the doldrums since the last Congressional elections. They got tromped, and the reason they got tromped was that suddenly, without warning, they weren't the party with ideas. They were merely the party with earmarks. Everybody, with the possible exception of some of the Dem rank and file, knows the Dems are corrupt. They're the party of Tammany Hall, of the Chicago machine, of the courthouse clique. That's what they do, and in 1996 the Pubs took Congress away from them because the Dems had become not only intellectually bankrupt, but too arrogant to even bother hiding their corruption. The Pubs thereupon began acting remarkably like Dems for the next ten years, until they got dumped. This left the body politic in the peculiar position of having a government run by reviled machine politicians and blatant demagogues -- remember that 13 percent approval rating -- while the Party of Ideas was reviled for whatcha might call "taking a wide stance" on the issues while it boodled. The rest of us, who weren't office holders, found ourselves actually trying not to pay attention to politix as the housing bubble swelled and burst and gas prices went through the roof. The pols all tried to sound like Ronald Reagan without bothering to act like him or, even more important, to fire the rest of us with his zest and vision. G.W. Bush, bless his heart, had good intentions but, let's face it: he's no Great Communicator. The best Dick Cheney could do was to pot an occasional lawyer, eliciting a golf clap but not really getting the nation fired up. All of which brings us back to Sarah Palin. When you're lost in the wilderness, it's good to find somebody who's at home there. There, barely noticed by most of us outside Alaska, was Sarah, turning back the money for the Bridge to Nowhere. There was Sarah, taking on an entrenched Republican clique as she took the governorship. There was Sarah in Juneau, duking it out with the oil companies -- Malefactors of Great Wealth, as T.Roosevelt would have called them -- and winning. More importantly, there was Sarah, being what we are or at least what we think we could be -- working on a fishing boat, working on PTA committees, raising a family, hunting moose, even winning a beauty contest. Those are Republican things, by Gum! Just as important is what she's not: she lived in an unorganized community, she's not a vegetarian, and if she speaks French it's not her preferred language. She's not a product of the Ivy League, and she's never been to a finishing school. She isn't in politix because her hubby keeled over dead or served a couple terms as president. She's her own woman. She's what feminism could have been. She's what we want our daughters and granddaughters to grow up to be. The Republicans are the mostly conservative party. It's what we've been since at least the Taft administration. But we're also the anti-party, which means we're not the party of the machine. That would kinda sorta make us by default (apologies to Ross Perot) the Reform party, which has been the tub John McCain's thumped lo, these many years. He hasn't always been right -- McCain-Feingold's a stench and an abomination, with more loopholes than any castle on the Rhine -- but he's been consistent. And there's Sarah, doing much the same things, and some of them better. And she's ever so much better looking than Joe Biden. Posted by: Fred 2008-09-05 |
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